Year: 2006

Posted on

Virtual Edessa

Did you ever wonder how Eusebius felt when he first walked into the archives of Edessa?

I felt something similar when I surfed over to Archive.org last week. I hadn’t been there in quite a while, and in the meantime its keepers (I imagine rows of monks in a high-tech scriptorium) had amassed volumes of wonderful patristic titles. Some of it’s in PDF images and some in PDF text.

Check out The First Age of Christianity and the Church by the controversial nineteenth-century theologian Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger. It takes some time to download, but it’s worth the wait. Dollinger weighed in on the losing side of the infallibility debate, but resisted the temptation to join the schismatics, as many of his friends had done. Perhaps he was saved by his profound knowledge of history.

One of the great, but forgotten achievements of the Oxford Movement was Thomas W. Allies’ multi-volume history of the Church, The Formation of Christendom, which Archive.org has posted in its entirety. Allies, an Anglican clergyman, swam the Tiber (i.e., converted to Roman Catholicism) in 1850, at great personal and professional cost. It was after his conversion that he wrote his massive historical work.

Thomas Allies’ daughter (and biographer), Mary H. Allies, appears on Archive.org for her 1898 translation of St. John Damascene on Holy Images. The volume also includes St. John’s three sermons on the dormition. (You can read her encyclopedia entry on her dad here.)

There’s more in the Archive, but I’ve spent too much time in Edessa. Time to get back to the inkwell.

Posted on

Hold On, Loosley

It’s not every day that an archeologist goes digging in the desert — and discovers a new method of evangelization. But that’s what happened to Dr. Emma Loosley of the University of Manchester in England, when she began her doctoral research in Syria in 1997. She was there to study the architecture of Christian churches of the fourth through seventh centuries. (As I reported in an earlier post, there are more than 700 “ghost towns” — abandoned Byzantine villages — dotting the barren hills between Antioch and Aleppo.)

Dr. Loosley discovered that the local Christians knew nothing about the history of the nearby ruins. Christians are a minority in Muslim-dominated Syria, and they have grown disenchanted with the land and with their religion. In school they learn almost nothing about the role of Christianity in ancient Syria — or the importance of Syria in the ancient Church. Thus, as Syrians, they feel alienated from Christianity; yet, as Christians, they feel alienated from their own country. Dr. Loosley observed that, in Aleppo, many old men opted to play backgammon outdoors on Sunday morning rather than attend the liturgy. Many young Christians simply left the country.

She suspected that their disenchantment had something to do with their historical disconnect. She wrote: “these men were alienated from the Church through ignorance and needed to be educated about their past.” She decided to do something about it:

In 1997 I began taking groups of Christians from Aleppo to the Limestone Massif, to the west of the city, in order to explain the abandoned late antique villages that dominate the landscape to them. These groups ranged in age from late teens and early twenties through to pensioners and we discussed how this kind of cultural awareness tied them more closely to the land than they had previously thought. In turn this caused them to question their self-imposed perception of themselves as ‘outsiders’ and to think in terms of a wider ‘Syrian’ identity.

She brought a deacon along, and the group prayed together in the ancient ruins.

Guess what: it worked. The old guys were fascinated and went back to church. The parishes’ women’s Bible-study groups now go on their own pilgrimages to the Christian ghost towns. And the young people who have taken the tours end up as the “least likely to emigrate.”

Her conclusions should be valuable, of course, for Christian minorities all over the Middle East — those who live in the lands of the ancient Fathers. Christians who know the monuments and their meaning are more likely to stay with the community. Those who know the tenets of the ancient faith, who know the local saints, and who have walked in their footsteps, are the Christians least likely to buy a one-way ticket to Australia or America.

I suspect, moreover, that the same principles apply, by extension, to westerners who take up the study of the Fathers and early Christian history. American Christians, after all, learn little of their religious history in the public schools; and we can, at times, feel somewhat alien in this land of abortion license. But Christians who know the monuments, so to speak — those who know the antiquity of the doctrines and rites — are less likely to leave the Church community, less likely to take interest in another religion, and less likely to choose backgammon over liturgy on a Sunday morning.

I encourage you to read Dr. Loosley’s paper, which appeared in the journal World Archaeology late last year. You have to register to view the article, but registration is free; and the article, titled “Archaeology and cultural belonging in contemporary Syria: the value of archaeology to religious minorities,” is included with the website’s free content.

If you’re in the market for a good introduction to Christianity in the region, read William Dalrymple’s travelogue, From the Holy Mountain. It’s a moving, though imperfect, account of the author’s travels among the vanishing Christian peoples of the Middle East.

Dr. Loosley’s work is discussed briefly in this book: Archaeology and World Religion.

Posted on

Footsteps of Francis

Those of you who are celebrating St. Francis’s feast day, take note: Our May 2007 pilgrimage proceeds from a week in Rome to an overnight in Assisi. While in Rome, of course, we’ll peek in on the dream of Pope Innocent III, in which he saw the tilting Lateran Basilica upheld by St. Francis. It’s memorialized in a statue outside the Lateran. Consider joining us for the trip!

Posted on

The Other Side of Ancient Liturgy

If you’ve read anything by Jesuit Father Robert Taft — or, better, if you’ve ever heard him speak — you know it can be a wild ride. He’s brilliant. He seems to have read all the ancient sources and committed them to memory, in the original languages. A longtime professor of liturgy and patristics at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, he served the early years of his priesthood in Baghdad. During civil unrest in the late 1950s, he traveled the Iraqi countryside observing the liturgies of the Syriac-speaking villages and monasteries. And there he got hooked on liturgics. Since then, he’s written about three dozen books and several hundred articles on the ancient liturgies and the Fathers. He is a Catholic priest of both the Latin and Byzantine rites.

It would be an understatement to say that Father Taft is outspoken. He has a first-rate mind, and he speaks it with force and wit. If you don’t believe me, read his 2004 interview with John Allen. It is the very image of the loose cannon rolling down the tilting deck of the barque of Peter. I’m sure it sent several dozen ecumenists into damage-control mode for weeks afterward.

His academic work has been a little more restrained in expression, but no less certain in its conclusions.

But his most recent book — Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It — now that’s another story.

This is a book that combines the academic rigor of the published Father Taft with the frankness of his live lectures. Indeed, the book is made up of edited transcripts of his 2005 Paul G. Manolis Distinguished Lectures at the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, California.

It’s a book by turns moving and entertaining. Father Taft sets out to give us a “bottom-up” view of the Byzantine liturgy, as it was experienced by the congregations of late antiquity, rather than explicated by the mystagogues. The situation was, as he points out, “not all incense and icons.”

Citing the Great Fathers, he evokes free-ranging congregations where young men and women trolled the crowd for romance. Chrysostom complained that the women at church were no different from courtesans, and the men like “frantic stallions.” Chrysostom also noted that people were talking throughout the liturgy, and “their talk is filthier than excrement.” Old Golden Mouth went on to report that the rush for Communion proceeded by way of “kicking, striking, filled with anger, shoving our neighbors, full of disorder.”

It almost makes today’s American parishes look reverent.

Taft walks us through the liturgy, from introit to dismissal, in a kind of reverse mystagogy. Traditional mystagogy begins with the outward signs and proceeds to their hidden meaning. Taft, however, begins with the assumption that the liturgy is heavenly, and then shows us the very incarnational, very earthly (and earthy) details of the scene where heaven touches down. At each stage of the rites, he quotes from contemporary accounts of what was going on in the assembly. We learn about the vigorous singing, the popularity of the Psalms, and the entertainment value of a sonorous homily, even if it’s in an archaic language that no one understands.

Liturgy was central to life in the big city. Entire populations turned out for icon processions and for the translation of relics. Sometimes, these mass liturgical rallies turned into mob scenes as the herd stampeded toward the center of grace. He brings up the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria’s story about the man who bit off a piece of the true cross to take home as a souvenir.

And yet, for all that, “the Church’s earthly song of praise is but an icon, the reflection — in the Pauline sense of mysterion, a visible appearance that is bearer of the reality it represents — of the heavenly liturgy of the Risen Lord before the throne of God. As such, it is an ever-present, vibrant participation in the heavenly worship of God’s Son.”

“Byzantine art and ritual,” he says as he brings his final lecture to its conclusion, “far from being all ethereal and spiritual and transcendent and symbolic, was in fact a very concrete attempt at portrayal, at opening a window onto the sacred, of bridging the gap.”

And that’s what we must never forget. Even the best dressed and best behaved folks among us are oafs and waifs pressing dirty noses against the window. If we spend our hour of worship worrying about the comportment of the Joneses in the next pew, we’re probably missing the point of liturgical worship.

Taft’s book is probably a good counter-balance for those of us who spend hours feeding off the liturgical works of Ambrose, Cyril, and Theodore (though we do get a hint of the underside in Augustine, too). Father Taft confesses that he himself has written books romanticizing the ancient liturgies. Maybe Through Their Own Eyes is his act of reparation. In any event, it’s our gain.

This book will inflame passions all around. But, in the illustrious career of Robert Taft, what else is new? The lectures include the transcripts of the question-and-answer periods afterward. And there the erudite father does not mince words as he asserts the appropriateness of the vernacular, the “stupidity” of the mania for liturgical variety, and so on.

Google points me to a Taft work available free online, and it’s my pleasure to pass it on to you: Eastern-Rite Catholicism: Its Heritage and Vocation. I know he’s published another, more controversial (and entertaining) treatment of the same theme somewhere; but I can’t seem to track it down at the moment. Meantime, enjoy the Taft you have at hand. And buy the new book. It’s a time-machine trip — and a joy ride.

Posted on

The Fathers for Pennies

Liturgical Press has drastically reduced the prices of some good patristic titles.

Enrico Mazza’s Mystagogy: A Theology of Liturgy in the Patristic Age is now $3.63 (down from $14.50).

Joseph T. Lienhard’s anthology on holy orders in the patristic era, Ministry, is now $2.99 (down from $11.95).

Thomas Halton’s anthology of patristic texts on The Church is now $3.74 (don’t know the original price).

Kilian McDonnell’s Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan: The Trinitarian and Cosmic Order of Salvation is now $6.24 (down from $24.95).

Posted on

Guardians Dear

Today’s the feast of the guardian angels. Everybody has one. The Scriptures say so (see Ps 34:7, Mt 18:10, Ac 12:15). The Fathers say so:

HERMAS (150 A.D.): “There are two angels with a man — one of righteousness, and the other of iniquity … The angel of righteousness is gentle and modest, meek and peaceful. When he ascends into your heart, he speaks to you of righteousness, purity, chastity, contentment, and every other righteous deed and glorious virtue. When all of these things come into your heart, know that the angel of righteousness is with you.”

CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA (195 A.D.): “The Scripture says, ‘The angels of the little ones, and of the rest, see God.’ So he does not shrink from writing about the oversight … exercised by the guardian angels.”

ORIGEN (225 A.D.): “Every believer — although the humblest in the Church — is said to be attended by an angel, who the Savior declares always beholds the face of God the Father. Now, this angel has the purpose of being his guardian.”

ST. GREGORY THE WONDERWORKER (255 A.D.): “I mean that holy angel of God who fed me from my youth.”

ST. METHODIUS (290 A.D.): “We have learned from the inspired writings that all who are born … are committed to guardian angels.”

So there you go. The doctrine was around centuries — well, several weeks anyway — before anybody thought of printing a syrupy holy card. I culled the quotes from David W. Bercot’s Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, whose 704 pages are a real bargain at $19.95 new. The book is quite good, in spite of an intermittent Protestant bias (e.g., in his selection on the intercession of the saints). But in his abundant quotations on guardian angels, Bercot gives us ten from Origen alone!

Get to know your guardian angel. They’re there with us to light and guard, rule and guide. We, however, can choose to be more or less open to their influence. What a waste if we choose less of a pure and heavenly intelligence.

UPDATE: Danny Garland gives us Jerome’s take on Guardian Angels, plus assorted prayers.

Posted on

Nestorius Back in Print

Roger Pearse has posted an English translation of the Bazaar of the heresiarch Nestorius (writing under a pseudonym). Nestorius is a tough read, as even his ancient critics liked to point out. But the manuscript history of the Bazaar is a fast-paced international thriller that takes us through rough patches of geopolitics of the last century. Some of the few copies vanished in massacres in Kurdistan. Another was destroyed in World War I.

A man of the Antiochene school, Nestorius tried to articulate a christology that would oppose two other heresies, Arianism and Apollinarianism. In doing so, he over-corrected, and his rationalism drove him to conclude that Christ existed as two distinct persons, the man Jesus and the divine Son of God. A further consequence was his denial of the title “Mother of God” to the Virgin Mary. He claimed she was mother only to Christ’s human nature.

St. Cyril of Alexandria argued forcefully for the hypostatic union — a single “I” in Jesus Christ. Cyril also pointed out that a mother gives birth to a person, not a nature. The Council of Ephesus rejected Nestorius’s doctrine in 431. (More on the controversy here.)

Posted on

Will Iraq’s Christian History Be “History”?

Now comes more unsettling news on the fate of the material patrimony of Christians in the Middle East. I’m posting this Times story, Archaeologists Worry That Iraq Will Erase Its Pre-Islamic History, as a follow-up to my previous posts here and here. Many of the “pre-Islamic” sites the authors mention are the monasteries and churches where Syriac Christianity emerged.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — There is mounting concern among scholars that the appointment of religiously conservative Shiite Muslims throughout Iraq’s traditionally secular archaeological institutions could threaten the preservation of the country’s pre-Islamic history.

Dr. Donny George’s recent departure as chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, and his flight to Syria with his family, is among the latest results of a transformation that began in December when a Shiite-dominated government was elected in Baghdad. The radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who commands his own militia, emerged with enough seats in Parliament to take control of four ministries and to create a Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, traditionally under the Ministry of Culture, now reports to this new ministry as well.

“The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities wants to control Iraq’s archaeological heritage by demolishing this institution, one of the oldest institutions in Iraq,” George said from Damascus. “This will be a disaster for this field, and for the cultural heritage of the country.”

Although the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has begun operating, the law creating it has not yet been approved by Parliament, said Abudul Zahra al-Talaqani, a spokesman for the new ministry.

The proposed law would divide the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage into four administrative departments: museums, excavations, manuscripts and heritage. The present departments of restoration and research would be eliminated, suggesting that preservation and scholarship would no longer be the institution’s focus.

The long history of secular scholarship in Iraq has covered all periods, including excavations at the Islamic site of Samarra and the restoration of Ukhaidir, an Islamic fortress near Karbala. Earlier sites include ruins from the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Parthian and Sassanian civilizations.

The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage was created in 1923, when Gertrude Bell, the British explorer and administrator, founded the Iraqi National Museum. “It was the best in the whole Middle East,” said Dr. McGuire Gibson, a professor of Mesopotamian archaeology at the University of Chicago. “At one point there were 13 Iraqi Ph.D.’s working there.”

Liwa Sumaysim, the new minister of tourism and antiquities, is a dentist whose wife, a member of Parliament, is related to al-Sadr. The new ministry has already replaced employees of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage at the national and local level.

Burhan Shakur, an archaeologist who was director of excavations at the Iraqi Museum, was fired in the spring, then given the option to retire; he has left for Germany. Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the inspector for antiquities in the Dhi Qar province, an area rich in pre-Islamic sites, was jailed in April on charges of corruption. After three months he was released, and the charges were dropped. But his job was then filled by a man with ties to Al Fadilah, an Islamist party aligned with the Sadr movement.

With the looting of archaeological sites in southern Iraq still thriving, control of the antiquities department is a significant prize. Most of the archaeological sites in the southern Dhi Qar province are pre-Islamic, dating roughly from 3200 B. C. to A. D. 500. A link between Islamic militants and looting at pre-Islamic archaeological sites has long been suspected, but is difficult to prove. The Nasiriyah Museum was burned and looted in 2004 by militants affiliated with al-Sadr. The museum’s guards reported that the militants promised to do to the antiquities there exactly “what the Taliban did.”

The center for Iraq’s illicit antiquities trade, Fajr, in the heart of the Sumerian plain, is also a stronghold for militants loyal to al-Sadr. And anti-Western graffiti has appeared at looted archaeological sites.

“It is hard to say yes or no if these gangs have a relation with the Sadr movement,” cautioned Mufeed al-Jazairi, Iraq’s first minister of culture after the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded, noting that looters were active in Saddam Hussein’s time as well. “But it is not surprising to imagine that one of these gangs will announce that they are allies with Sadr, hoping to gain a political shield in case they are being followed by authorities.”

“If the destruction of sites continues, it is not just the death of archaeology,” Gibson of the University of Chicago said. “Antiquities are key to Iraq’s economy; at some point the oil will run out. Iraqi tourism will be built on archaeology.”

Yet Gibson warned that putting an archaeological department under a tourism office tends to have negative consequences because sites may become mothballed, and research possibilities lost.

The Sadrist leadership in the new ministry has made its views known in other ways. Recently two pre-Islamic statues it returned to the Iraqi Museum were accompanied by a note describing them as “idols.” Dr. Elizabeth Stone, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology who has excavated in southern Iraq, said that officials of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities had also visited the museum before the departure of George, who is Christian, and asked, “Do you want to be governed by a crusader?”

Posted on

Train Your Monocle on the Noncanonical

But back to Jim Davila for a moment. Jim, who blogs at PaleoJudaica, was in Ottawa this weekend to present a paper titled More Christian Apocrypha. The paper’s worth your perusal. He’s cataloging the efforts by scholars around the world to translate the noncanonical ancient texts attributed to the apostles, prophets, and other biblical characters. These texts are not inspired, of course, not inerrant, and not what we call “Scripture,” but they tell us much about the early Church, its concerns and, sometimes, its lunatic fringes. With all the current scholarly activity Jim describes, we have a lot of fascinating reading to look forward to.

(But what would Jerome say?)